Friday False Facts Feature: Nikola Tesla’s Mythical Electric Car

You know what’s great about the internet? Other than the very real possibilities of seeing your cherished childhood cartoon favorites engaging in extremely depraved sexual experiments? The incredible ability of the internet to spread complete horseshit around the globe, clad in the respectable garments of fact. There’s one “fact” that I’d like to talk about today, because it’s one I’ve seen referenced for years, off and on, and has been so subtly pervasive that I had to take a moment to remember if it was actually true or not. It’s the story of Nikola Tesla’s electric car.

Now here’s the thing about the idea of Nikola Tesla building an electric car: it could have happened. Just that basic premise itself isn’t really all that unbelievable. After all, the first electric car was built in 1832 by Scottish inventor Robert Anderson, and during the late 1800s and early 1900s electric cars were a viable competitor to both gasoline and steam vehicles. Each power source was a viable contender, and electric cars, even in their early, crude, lead-acid-battery state, had some real advantages over steam or gas cars, being cleaner and quieter and far less likely to break your arm while starting it.

I even once made a whole explainer video about this early era of EVs:

Even the famous inventor Thomas Edison, one of Nikola Tesla’s great rivals, was experimenting with and building electric cars in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

So, with this in mind, it certainly would have been possible for Tesla to have built some sort of battery-powered EV. The timeline associated with Tesla’s alleged electric car, around 1931, would certainly be plausible, and would even be a little bit late, as gasoline had clearly become the car fuel of choice by then.

This is why I always have to pause when I hear this story. Did Tesla build an EV? The way the story is usually told, that the car was built from a converted 1931 Pierce-Arrow, just makes everything more plausible, as he’s not even building a whole car from scratch; he’d just be converting a gasoline car to electricity.

These were handsome cars, the late ’20s-early ’30s Pierce-Arrows. They pioneered fairing the headlights into the fenders, which I think looked pretty fetching.

Anyway, if the whole rumor was just that Tesla took a Pierce-Arrow, yanked the gasoline drivetrain out, and stuck in some batteries and Tesla’s own AC motors, I think I’d at least file this in my brain under the “plausible” category, even if there weren’t any photographs or remains of the vehicle or anything like that.

But, of course, nothing is that simple.

No, because of the strange mythos that surrounds Nikola Tesla and his works, it’s not enough that he may have just built an electric car. No, that’s not what this pervasive myth is about. It’s about Tesla building a car that pulled its power right out of thin air. 

This description of the car shows up frequently online, and is allegedly from a book written by Arthur Abrom called The Forgotten Art of Electric-Powered Automobiles, which, it’s worth noting, is an art not forgotten:

“But, back to our electric automobiles — in 1931, under the financing of Pierce-Arrow and George Westinghouse, a 1931 Pierce-Arrow was selected to be tested at the factory grounds in Buffalo, NY. The standard internal combustion engine was removed and an 80-hp 1800  rpm electric motor installed to the clutch and transmission. The AC motor measured 40 inches long and 30 inches in diameter and the power leads were left standing in the air — no external power source!

At the appointed time, Nikola Tesla  arrived from New York City and inspected the Pierce-Arrow automobile.  He then went to a local radio store and purchased a handful of tubes (12), wires and assorted resistors. A box measuring 24 inches long, 12 inches wide and 6 inches high was assembled housing the circuit. The box was placed on the front  seat and had its wires connected to the air-cooled, brushless motor. Two rods 1/4″ in diameter stuck out of the box about 3” in length.

Mr. Tesla got into the driver’s seat, pushed the two rods in and stated, “We now have power”. He put the car into gear and it moved forward! This vehicle, powered by an AC  motor, was driven to speeds of 90 mph. and  performed better than any internal combustion engine of its day! One week was spent testing the vehicle.  Several newspapers in Buffalo reported this test. When asked where the power came from, Tesla replied, “From the ethers all around us”. Several people suggested that Tesla was mad and somehow in league with sinister forces of the universe. He became incensed, removed his mysterious box from the vehicle and returned to his laboratory in New York City. His secret died with him!

It is speculated that Nikola Tesla was able to somehow harness the earth’s magnetic field that encompasses our planet. And, he somehow was able to draw tremendous amounts of power by cutting these lines of force or causing them to be multiplied together. The exact nature of his device remains a mystery but it did actually function by powering the 80 hp AC motor in the Pierce Arrow at speeds up to 90 m.p.h. and no recharging was ever necessary!”

So, yeah, somehow the Pierce-Arrow was powered by harvesting energy from the “ether,” a mythical miasma of energy that some people believed fills the universe. Most modern cosmological models do not support this idea, at all, though some theories attempting to explain dark matter and unify physics have dragged this old concept back for re-consideration, sort of.

Practically, though, there is no evidence anything like the ether exists, and there sure as hell is no evidence that free energy can jusr be extracted from it with an antenna, allowing for 90 mph travel for free.

A lot of these stories seem to originate with interviews conducted in the late 1960s with Peter Savo, who claimed to be a nephew of Tesla. It does not seem that he actually was, and his claims of seeing the car in operation in Buffalo, NY appear to be fiction.

There’s other versions of the Tesla electric car story out there; in 1986 Arthur Matthews, who was Tesla’s assistant for a time and wrote a book in the 1940s about Tesla, made this claim about a Tesla electric car:

“And the battery, when installed in this electric car, will run that car five hundred miles before the battery needs to be attended to. And when the battery does need to be attended to it would take you ten minutes to remedy whatever is going on and the spare parts are all in the trunk. You have enough spare parts to keep that battery running twelve months of the year. You do not have to stop at the service station. You could run five hundred miles…..at seventy-five miles per hour……across the country and probably not have to stop more than fifteen minutes to attend to the batteries…”

In this description, the car does have a battery, albeit one with a 500 mile range and only needs to be “attended to” for 15 minute sessions, somehow.

This also appears to be, charitably, bullshit.

So where did all of this fantastical stuff come from? I think there’s a few sources. First, there’s all the experiments Tesla did with the wireless transmission of electricity via electromagnetic waves, including his never-completed Wardenclyffe Tower that would have attempted to broadcast electricity over the electromagnetic spectrum in large quantities.

These experiments were real, and he did manage to broadcast electricity over the air. But that’s a far cry from tapping into a source of free energy that just fills the universe, as the car stories usually suggest. There have been other stories of cars that just pull power from the air, like what’s being described in this 1921 article from the Arizona Republican:

These ideas had been flitting around a while, and Tesla just made an ideal anchor to hang them all on, with his vaguely related actual research and his status as an iconoclastic inventor who was unfairly wronged and ignored by “the establishment.”

The takeaway here, though, is that the Laws of Thermodynamics still stand, at least in this house, and the rumors of Tesla building an electric car that pulls energy from the air, are, of course, horseshit. It doesn’t even seem like he built any electric cars at all, despite likely having been capable.

Sorry to burst any bubbles, but there’s no free energy to be pulled from the air. Now, a magic smelt that you can throw in your car’s gas tank that will excrete 93 octane fuel forever, that may be true. At least, I’ve yet to see it disproven.